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Friday, 7 April 2017

I was so lucky to skype with the folks at Writefest about all things Doll Hospital Journal. Here's a rough transcript of what we chatted about :)

What isDoll
Hospitaland why did you
start it?

Doll Hospital is an art and literature journal on
mental health (though it’s of course great if people beyond that frame of
experience enjoy and appreciate our work too!) We consider both I suppose
‘traditional’ notions of ‘mental illness’, by which I mean individuals such as
myself who might consider themselves as ‘mentally ill’ as well as broader
questions of survival and self-love within a hostile world.

I’m not going to say we’re the final word on
mental health or anything ridiculous like that. It’s easy for small press
publications to set unachievable and arrogant goals, it’s a little bubble so it
can be tempting to see yourself as fancier than you are. However, with any
publishing project on marginalised narratives I think it’s better to see
yourself as part of a wider conversation and constellation of publishing and
creative projects.

I started Doll Hospital from a space of my own
mental health struggles and of wanting to find a platform to explore themes of
trauma and stigmatised mental illness beyond online magazines, where I found
myself to self-censor, to rebrand myself as more appealing, more sane in order
to appeal to both comment sections and a performative politics of
respectability and also beyond me live tweeting my suicidal ideation at 3am on
my Twitter.

How many people work on each issue?

On average we have around sixty contributors per
issue, with each issue spanning around 150 to 170 pages. Behind the scenes, I
manage and edit submissions, seeking editorial and proofing help from, on
average around half a dozen editors and proofers. Though I may have an editor
credential on my mast head I have complex learning difficulties, an element
that is rarely considered within publishing. So while I think I have a pretty
good eye for exploring and curating mental health narratives, I struggle so
much with practical issues such as spelling, formatting and some other quite
‘basic’ tasks. I remember in issue one before we got proofing help I spelt the
word ‘depression’ wrong in the contents, I was so embarrassed so I’m so
grateful for that side of the Doll Hospital team!

Beyond editing I work chiefly alongside Maggie,
our amazing graphic designer, this is definitely my favourite part of working
on Doll Hospital!We work on unique spreads for each
and every piece to do each story justice within a print medium and to provide a
visual narrative to our readers. We do all kinds of fun stuff like scanning
cute fabrics for backgrounds, sourcing interesting illustrations, handwriting
titles and poems (though that’s Maggie’s speciality-my handwriting is
rubbish!), choosing cover art and so on. Visually we are definitely inspired by
the beauty and texture of the Rookie Yearbook series and I’m so grateful for
the support of their editor Tavi Gevinson gave us when we were starting off.

What do you look for in submissions?

I don’t have any pre-set notions of what a
‘submission’ should be, I hate the idea that a work does not have ‘value’
because it does not match some pre-set aesthetic credentials set by an
editorial team, which itself turns so called inclusive spaces into weird cliques. There’s a worrying history of this within
feminist publishing history, whether that’s Sassy magazine’s alternative cool
girl mentality or the trauma anthology genre of the 1980s, where personal
stories were rejected because a survivor’s story was not written
‘sophisticatedly’ enough (which is a issue that Kali Tal, an amazing trauma
theorist and an inspiration of mine, interestingly critiques in her book
World’s of Hurt). Really I want our contributors to guide this process not me,
if they have a story they want to tell I just want to be here to help
facilitate the process.

What challenges have you run into when either
finding pieces to publish or publishing the journal itself?

Funding a print journal if you don’t have
disposable income is super tough! We fund printing costs for our hard copy
issues issues through hard copy pre-orders, whilst we sell digital copies of
our journals on a pay as you wish basis, which helps us pay for things like
postage so we can send free hard copies of our journals to our staff and
contributors. It’s a shoestring budget but
I try to make it work. For instance, we launch digital copies of our issues
before the print version goes out and once print versions have sold out, people
can still access the digital copy.

We’re very lucky that we’ve never been short of
amazing pieces to publish, we’ve had so many incredible submissions across all
mediums, whilst my own interest in mental health and wider self-advocacy work
for marginalised folks means I always have an endless list of people I’m keen
to reach out to. In this sense I think submission wise the most frustrating part
is lack of time and resources! We actually had to close our submissions for
writing works as I just couldn’t keep up and that kind of sucked. I need a time
machine and a pot of gold or something!

What role do you think literature and art plays
in one’s mental health?

That’s a tricky one, and something I think all creative
folk with mental health struggles circle around this endlessly. We are taught
that literature and art gives our struggles ‘value’ which is a structure I
would query, it feels like a scam, mental illness isn’t a coupon you can
exchange for a prize winning novel or something! I think this artificial
heritage of ‘the tortured genius’ can limit our creative freedom, it’s easy to
find yourself comparing yourself to tragic characters in movies and feel like
these totally ficticious individuals carry more weight, more credentials than
our actual lives!

However, I don’t think it’s as simple to say
that to engage with this history is to ‘romaticise’ it or even that to
‘romanticise’ something is always a bad thing, the people who adore this work
are often mentally ill themselves, especially mentally ill young women, teenage
girls. It’s meaning and role is reinterpreted and reinvented by the viewer to
create a world that is a little bit more beautiful for those who are far too
lonely to find the ‘real world’ to be enough. And yes I am partly talking about
myself here! I’m a total pop culture geek! Even with corny things like the
Suicide Squad movie I love watching them and thinking about them and what they
mean to people.

There are a number of issues related to mental
health that are included in the magazine. How do you decide which ones to
include? In other words, do you try to include pieces that cover a whole slew
of mental health issues, or do you aim to publish the best of what you receive,
regardless of which issues are covered (or not covered) in each issue?

I don’t have a pre-set idea of what mental
health (or broader oppression experiences) should and ‘will’ be included, our
submitters guide that, I don’t start with certain pre-set ideas that seems
weird to me, you can’t theme this stuff, you just give people the space and the
platform to tell the stories they need to tell. The range happens naturally
because everyone has different experiences, different intersecting oppressions,
different struggles. You can’t force that to happen.

When it comes to submissions I actually have a
‘no rejection’ rule, I mean right now we can’t look at writing subs as we
simply don’t have the space, but when submissions are open whoever reaches out
to us is going to be in Doll Hospital. Maybe that’s not ‘practical’ or whatever
but I don’t care. If someone wants to be in the journal then they’re in! If a
piece is not quite developed or suitable for publication straight away then
we’ll work with them until it is, even bringing in different artists for cross
collaboration to support them in their storytelling. If the original piece
submitted is not quite right then we will ask to see additional work. We live
in a disposable culture where we judge someone by one email, one draft, it’s a
case of taking time to collaborate and connect with each of our contributors. I
know what it’s like to get rejection after rejection, how crushing it is, to
enforce that kind of mentality in a journal which works within anti-ableism advocacy….well
that would be messed up and nonsensical!

How do you think the magazine addresses issues
of helping people to understand mental health versus sensationalizing it? And
connected to that, do you feel like the magazine is aimed more for people who
have a mental health issue or is it to educate/bring awareness to those who do
not have a mental health issue?

Doll Hospital is created for those struggling
with mental health and the psychological impacts of intersecting oppressions,
it’s not so much an ‘awareness tools’ for able-minded people, for people who
are not struggling, though if individuals outside of mental health and survival
struggles, appreciate and our educated by the work in Doll Hospital that’s
great.

The ‘awareness’ model of mental health often
feels a little strange, like I am altogether aware I’m mentally ill (!) but how
are we going to use this *awareness* to change the world around us to make it
more liveable? Awareness without action is not sustainable support for those
who need it most.

One of the most common models of this is these
‘talk about mental health day’ iniatives, I can’t help but find these
sanctioned mental health awareness days a little frustrating, to me it feels
like those who are struggling *are* talking, not just 1 day but all 365 days a
year, it’s just that our needs are not necessarily being listened to, ask
anyone in Britain who is struggling to access mental health care via the NHS,
mentally ill individuals are reaching out, seeking to bring awareness to the struggles
they face, but due to profound cuts to disability support these voices are not
being recognised or can’t be addressed without the resources needed. Jade, a
doll hospital contributor, actually wrote an amazing essay on this issue in
Doll Hospital Issue Four.

But in regards to the question of
sensationalising mental health, like I said before, I personally don’t think a
mentally ill person looking to express their experiences needs to be shut down
under the lines of sensationalisation, or romanticsation, that’s an able minded issue, that romanticsation of mental illness as like a tragic super power or
whatever. Yes, those of us are isolated may gravitate towards certain aesthetic
models of expression, certain pop cultural symbols, but that’s a question of
making life a little more bearable. I think people who get mad at mentally ill teenage
girls for being to into like…Winona Ryder or Courtney Love or… whatever need to
get their priorities in order.

What do you think about using humor when writing
about serious subjects?

Humour is a subject I think about constantly in
regards to mental health and trauma, I’m actually writing my entire PhD on it
as it happens! I also wrote an entire essay for Doll Hospital on navigating
trauma and cultivating survivordom through comedy characters like Bernard Black
in Black Books, Mordecai in the Regular Show and Charlie Kelly in It’s Always
Sunny in Philadelphia.

Though I should say I’ve recently got pretty
disillusioned with It’s Always Sunny I stopped watching after the first episode
of the most recent season as it fell into that ‘say anything as long as it’s
presented as a joke’ model, not
only is this just lazy writing, I think this does the power of comedy a
disservice! Because the whole point in humour is that it *does* have power to
both enforce and subvert existing belief systems, to topple the powerful and
belittle the already vulnerable, to dismiss something as ‘just a joke’ (which
is so often the standard trademark of a school bully) fails to realise how
powerful humour really is.

One of the reason I became drawn to humor was
through the act of nervous laughter, I effectively got ‘told off’ in therapy as
I nervously laughed when describing an traumatic event. I was told that I was
not taking my childhood sexual abuse background seriously enough! Like what the
fuck does that mean? What’s the correct way of dealing with such a difficult
thing?

I love comedy and humour because I hate the
politics of respectability that tells us there’s one ‘right’ way, one
‘respectable’ way to address such a deeply personal issue.

How do you organize each issue?

Each issue has certain standard features, at
least two or more interviews, a mental health themed playlist, a roundtable
discussion that discusses a marginalised mental health experience, an editor’s
letter and of course as much awesome art, comics, poetry and essays on mental
health and survival experiences that we can fit in!

I always try and balance text with the visuals, not
everyone likes to read, not everyone as a result of mental health can
concentrate on a long form text piece, or a result of associated learning or
developmental disabilities finds reading a lengthy essay a realistic feat, so
for every essay we include I make sure we also have a range of comics,
paintings and illustrations that tell a story too.

However, in terms of accessibility for improving
our issues we’re working on translating our issues into screen reader form so
Doll Hospital readers who are blind or visually impaired can enjoy the artwork
too. This is a longer process than I would like though, I wish I’d translated
it all already by now! I’d also be so interested in translating Doll Hospital
into different languages however my translation skills are non-existent sadly!

What do you hopeDoll Hospitalwill accomplish (or continues to
accomplish) in the future?

Oh
gosh, honestly when I started Doll Hospital in 2014, nearly three years ago, I
had no expectations it was just a tweet asking if anyone wanted to make a
mental health zine with me, I didn’t realise it was going to materialise in
such beautiful and unexpected ways. Similarly I have no expectations with what
and how Doll Hospital will develop or divulge in the future, I’m just happy to
be here.

"For
breakfast I ordered a poached egg on a piece of toast. When the dish arrived –
and I tell you, it makes my stomach curdle just to write about it – there was a
gleaming, curly, jet-black human hair, three inches long, lying diagonally across
the yolk of my poached egg.

Whose hair was it
that had lain embedded in the slimy yolk of my egg at breakfast? Undoubtedly it
was the cook’s hair. And when, pray, had the cook last washed his head? He had
probably never washed his head. Very well, then. He was almost certainly
verminous. But that in itself would not cause a hair to fall out. What did
cause the cook’s hair, then, to fall out on to my poached egg this morning as
he transferred the egg from the pan to the plate. There is a reason for all
things, and in this case the reason was obvious. The cook’s scalp was infested
with purulent seborrhoeic impetigo. And the hair itself, the long black hair
that I might so easily have swallowed had I been less alert, was therefore swarming
with millions and millions of loving pathogenic cocci whose exact scientific
name I have, happily, forgotten."

-The Visitor,
Roald Dahl

A ball of black hair down a silver shower drain in a white bath. Dark
hair is disgust, nothing is nastier than pulling out a medium sized mammal from
the shower drain, a space of cleanliness turned dirty by the passing presence
of a racialized body. It is the embodiment of filth. It is pubic and obscene.
It is coarsely crawling around on its snake-y belly with an afterlife of its
own.

I starved myself, to de-sex, because I was molested and I was swarthy,
because the two felt connected somehow, because I was molested, I was not
blonde, and I was not a child, was never a child, could never be a child, no
one would do that to a child so I was not a child. I starved myself to torch
myself, my hair fell out, my hair fell out.

My thoughts are weeds each hair is a weed, I pull out the intrusive
thoughts that pop out of my parting. All my thoughts are bad because I am bad.
I am so bad and so ugly. I am out of control and so is my hair.

On the internet it says Arab girls are so ugly (read-so hairy) that
they cover themselves not out of devotion but out of shame.

I started cutting when I started shaving.

Dark hair absorbs warmth, it heats my head, makes it glow like a halo.
This is good as England is cold and cruel in both temperature and temperament.

When I was 15 I stood in front of the classroom projector and my dark
curls projected on the whiteboard and the GHD girls laughed with their blue
eyes and stable homes and said 'thank god that's not me'.

When I was 10 I was told I could not have a Jennifer Anniston hair cut
because it did not work on 'ethnic hair', when I was 19 I was told I could not
have a fringe because it did not work on 'ethnic' hair.

When I was 19 I stopped going to the hairdressers as no one wanted to
cut my 'ethnic' hair. My black hair split from salon neglect. I pulled out the
split ends, twisted off the breakages to keep it neat. I pulled high to the
heaven until I pulled it out at the root. Pulling out my hair in public as a
form of public apology for the space I occupy.

A failed apology though. Each hair I pull I am shedding more of myself
though I am also sharing more of myself. Who wants to find long black hair on
their seat. That's gross. That's dirty. I'm gross. I'm dirty.

I shave my back. I shave my hands. I shave my arms. I shave my face
because there is too much to pluck.

'You can shave your back now Jason' says Regina George in Mean Girls!
I am Jason! I am a monster!

I want to die but my hair is dead already. A dead thing, a foul thing.

My boyfriend finds a skull shaped box filled with my hair, he asks me
what it means but it doesn't mean anything, I'm not that deep, I'm not deep at
all.

Sexual violence survivordom is satanic worship and psychosis is magic
demon power so either way I am going to Hell. No! I am not going to Hell. What a silly thing
to say. I am Hell. You are going to me. When you die I'll carry you inside me.
I will cradle you in my belly like the wooden crotch of a big oak tree in an
Enid Blyton book where the little dormice live with their straw bonnets and
scarves eating apple pie and talking magic.

I am not an Evil person, I am Evil itself. I am not Eve, I am the
Apple. I am not Sméagol, turned monstrous in his addiction, I am the one Ring
that made the poor fellow that way. The Instigator not the Embodier. She
Devil. It is much worse to be the
whisper in the ear making the poor person do the bad thing than the innocent
oaf that gets sucked along for the ride. Those piddly paedophiles with their
magazine columns and their Hollywood movies are the victims I am not. Calling
him a rapist really hurt his feelings and don't you know a court case will look
bad on his CV? I am a bully. I am petty. I am increasingly realising that my
function in life is to comfort the happy childhood-ed fangirls when their
favourite rapist celebrity dies.

The survivor is the bad thing.
The original evil. The one that made him like this.

The She Devil on his shoulder.

It is all my fault.

The satanic survivor is amongst the living dead. Reanimator. A zombie
in a pink cardigan who can write uncomfortable think pieces and might click
maybe on your birthday party but won't actually ever turn up. She hasn't eaten
one bit of breakfast but has reserved seats in the quiet carriage of the train
station so that is something. The Satanic Survivor is a big success! She is
wearing shoes and under eye concealer!

Being a survivor does not feel like surviving it feels like a living
death. 'I AM AWAKE IN THE PLACE WHERE WOMEN DIE' shouts Jenny Holzer. But I do
not wish to be awake, to be imbedded in this death space. My body is both war
crime and war memorial. Surviving should equate to success, to escape, so why
am I like this?

I am fascinated by Female Evil. The two-faced witch, whose crone-y
crime is the aged ugliness she hides from the men who want to fuck her, her
secret smelly face that shows only when alone and naked in bed. Snow White, The
Shining, Game of Thrones, memes of girls with and without make up, a movie
monster with as many incarnations as Michael Myers. Take her swimming on the
first date, see if she has her devil face beneath the skin. Ugliness is evil,
it is a betrayal. Beauty is evil too of course, though explanations differ on
the what and why. Some say it makes people crazy, turns family men into
neighbourhood child molesters. The child rape victim is not a child she is a
Beautiful Nymphet, outside of innocence and outside of accountability.

The She Devil on the sex offender's shoulder strikes again.

It is all my fault, again.

And it is becoming increasingly clear that the female serial killer,
the female evil, She Devil incarnate, is less Hannibal Lecter and more a
countless list of working class women who have been sexually abused across
infancy and adolescence, spit out from society and shut out from sympathy, only
to be obviously and inevitably swallowed into abusive relationship of extraordinary
damage.

When I am told I am Evil for experiencing the worst things warm
blooded murder is perhaps an outcome that would be convenient to ignore. The
violence not of turning into your abuser but of becoming so scared that
everyone is your abuser that you will punch out at anyone who presses too deep.
When the crimes of our abusers are welcomed with a smile, whilst we are pushed
out of heaven for being nasty little holes, it is understandablewe want to rebrand
ourselves as Saints and not She Devils. Those this and that outlines which
press against the hipbones of overtly unwell women until they eventually draw
blood. The hyper vigilance of post-traumatic stress disorder is a saucepan to
smash the skulls of those around us.

Always on. Always Evil. Always tired. That curious mix of cruelty and
creepiness that embodies the enduring fascination with childhood sexual abuse.
The time lapse of the body. The endless rape. I Spit on Your Grave is a movie
made in 1978 that has been playing on loop ever since its consummation. You
think it’s about to end but it never does. They all keep coming back. The infinite
gang rape swells across time, stretches over breakfast, lunch and dinner,
before being clipped like a pigeon’s wing into a YouTube masturbatory montages
and rewarded with a remake. This trauma never ends!

But they want that sweet, sweet She Devil, they need her. They need
me. (Or me if I was not so greasy and so ugly and so ethnic). There’s a reason
Harley Quinn is the Halloween costume of choice and not the Joker. They need
the She Devil, to beat and to fuck, and on very special occasion even to be.
Whether in a dress up show costume or a coveted movie role. A very special mask
to pass around the dinner table.

I am a necessary evil, a warning, a dress up box, a ghost story. A She
Devil.